Page 454 - Some Dance to Remember

424 Jack Fritscher

even Solly’s work remained. Tiger had stolen the videotape master copies
and sold them at a buck a piece on the street to kids eager to tape MTV.
Kick was gone. Teddy was gone. Kweenie was living with January in El
Lay. Of all the friends and acquaintances he once had in San Francisco,
several had moved away from the City, a dozen were dead from disease,
the rest were cool, almost unforgiving, for his having dropped them, hav-
ing dropped everybody, during his affair with Kick. The muscle crowd
Kick had drawn to them was no longer interested once Kick had split.
When Ryan passed them on Castro, they were unforgiving: they not only
ignored him, they gave him Attitude. Readers of Maneuvers sent letters
complaining he had abandoned the magazine. The few women he had
known, mostly Kweenie’s friends, remained miffed over the dead issue of
the Manifesto.
He feared cruising new acquaintances, afraid they’d end up in bed,
and he was resolved that could never happen. No one was sure what safe
sex was. AIDS was a lottery. The more chances you took, the more your
chance of winning, which meant losing. AIDS was like murder. A man’s
chance of contracting AIDS was one in a hundred; the chance of his being
murdered was one in a hundred and thirty-three. He was truly alone. His
life became a solitary masturbation. He was a victim of the ass-end of the
sexual revolution.
He hated the changing Castro. Old faces gone. New faces eager to
find the party they did not know was over. The quaint gay shops that
had given the Castro its ambience gave way to chain stores. Asian res-
taurants opened overnight and competed with the gay restaurants where
sometimes, despite his unreasonable fear of disease, for auld lang syne, he
ventured out to eat alone, still aching with love for Kick, disguised with
mirrored CHP shades and a blue SFPD ball cap. He sat alone, insulated
from the dapper waiters. He dissolved into the sounds coming from the
other tables where he and Kick had once dined.
I could not help but think those gay men and lesbian women had
all come, the way we all came, immigrants and refugees from all across
the country to become Californians. They—and I mean we, although
I am only a scholarly fellow traveler and sympathizer, because I am not
exactly one of them—all trekked west for sexual and political freedom,
for love, happiness, real estate, and each other. Instead, somehow very
much instead, they conjured lust and greed and abuse and Death. They
all thought they were special. And they were. All of them. Ryan lived and
wrote and told them they were chosen, charmed, gifted, exempt. They
thought the party would never stop.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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